


Why Kurt Hummel Hates Vampires

by Miggy



Category: Glee
Genre: Angst, Crack, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-06
Updated: 2012-09-06
Packaged: 2017-11-13 16:53:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/505675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miggy/pseuds/Miggy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>There have been a few moments in the show where Kurt reacted poorly to vampires. It's one of the odder pieces of continuity once noticed, and, so... well....</p>
<p>Here.</p>
<p>Crack angst. It's apparently a thing.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Why Kurt Hummel Hates Vampires

**Author's Note:**

> There have been a few moments in the show where Kurt reacted poorly to vampires. It's one of the odder pieces of continuity once noticed, and, so... well....
> 
> Here.
> 
> Crack angst. It's apparently a thing.

When Kurt Hummel saw his mother for the last time, she looked like she was crying.

"Dad?" he asked uncertainly, in a suit too large for his slight frame. It felt like a wool-blend prison on that warm, early summer day. His mother had bought it on winter clearance, hoping that he'd be perfectly sized for it by next Christmas' formal portrait. Overwhelmed by everything, it was what Burt had pulled out for the funeral and told him to wear. "Is Mom... sad?" Dead people were supposed to be gone forever, and not move any more, but they also weren't supposed to have tears on their cheeks.

"No," Burt said, his face lined and sagging. "It's holy water." He glanced at the man all dressed in black who was giving the sermon, and nodded once, shortly. The man nodded back.

Kurt didn't understand. He saw pieces of silver jewelry scattered around his mother, and that made sense. She loved jewelry, just like she loved makeup and scarves and flowers. He'd picked out a scarf when Burt had asked him to do so, and sure enough, the people who'd put on her last outfit had tied it tightly around her neck. The silver cross necklace wrapped around her wrist was probably a last gift from someone else. It was very pretty. All of the jewelry was pretty.

But he didn't understand why someone would put water on his mother and leave it there when she couldn't even wipe it off. "Dad, no," Kurt said, and tried to reach in.

Burt caught his hand and squeezed it tightly.

"No, _no_ ," Kurt said, and now he wanted to cry, too. "It'll ruin her makeup."

"It's all right, Kurt," Burt said. He stared at his dead wife, unblinking. Though his grip on Kurt wasn't quite firm enough to hurt, it was like iron as Kurt tugged. "Everything's going to be all right."

The coffin lid was sealed with the holy water still on her cheeks.

In his young mind, Kurt took a while to wholly understand about the permanence of death and what it was like to only have one parent, but he'd grown up watching his mother tend almost obsessively to her makeup. The absolute minimum for stepping outside was powder, mascara, and lip gloss. Now her mascara might run. She wouldn't be able to fix it.

Burt didn't know why Kurt was crying about her makeup, and Kurt couldn't explain it well enough for him to understand. Burt cried about other things, though, and they worked through their tears together.

Two months after the funeral, Kurt had his first real nightmare about the evening his mother had died. By the time he woke, sweating, the details were already slipping back into the night.

They came infrequently after that, shadowy half-remembered movies on late night television. Sometimes he could make out a white face through the static: even paler than him, with eyes in such strange colors that he wanted to ask his father to fix the screen. Sometimes he heard his mother's voice telling him to get down and hide, or a stranger's voice telling him to look up, because it would all be over soon.

The last bit always fell away as soon as he tried to remember more of it. He'd looked up at... at _something_ , and everything else in the world seemed to vanish. Had his mother been dying already? If so, why wasn't he helping her? Why was he staring up at that cold, pale thing, just waiting for it to—

Kurt jerked awake again, breathing hard. He hadn't cried out, though. His mother had told him to stay quiet, even though it hadn't helped either of them. The cold pale thing had found him, anyway. Then other people had come, and... Kurt pounded his small fist against the mattress in anger as he tried to remember. Everything was slipping away from memory again, just as it had before.

Over the years, the dreams came less frequently. The broadest details began to etch themselves in firmly enough to remember even in daylight, but they were so vague as to be meaningless: that pale face, his helplessness, his mother on the ground, a mind clouded by sudden fog. A neck covered as his mother went into the ground, and holy water and pieces of silver scattered on top of her body in the shapes of every religion he could think of.

By the time that Kurt was old enough to recognize those pieces as falling into a logical whole, he was also old enough to know that the answer to that puzzle was the furthest thing from _logical._ He ignored it. His mother had been killed by a man with a knife as they ran errands after a movie. That was all. Any other pieces were figments of his childhood mind, and he'd always had a very active imagination.

Still, he knew. Some tiny part of him knew. It remembered hiding like a prey animal, hoping that he wouldn't be seen.

'Vampire' was such a silly word. It was a word for make-believe monsters, and he was far too old and mature for that. The bigger part of his mind scoffed at the idea that they could be real, but that tiny prey corner froze at any presentation of the creatures, and Kurt reacted despite himself. Like lingering nausea after seeing a dish that had once given him food poisoning, Kurt wouldn't admit that he was _scared_ , but his body always rejected the idea of coming any closer. No matter how old he got, and how many nights came between him and that one that he'd forcefully re-written, that tiny kernel of knowledge never left him.

"Isn't he gorgeous?" sighed Mercedes Jones, years later.

Kurt went very still as he saw that the latest Twilight poster had gone up inside the local multiplex. The adult, rational part of his mind talked about plots and romances and embracing every ridiculous idea that Stephenie Meyer had run with at a hundred miles per hour. But that tiny kernel looked at the photoshopped face of Robert Pattinson, the pallid skin and inhuman eyes, and trembled. He hadn't expected to see the poster, yet. He'd watched the movies without any but the slightest rare trembles, but he'd known they were coming.

"I like Taylor Lautner better," he heard himself say, and stared at the werewolf. _Werewolves aren't real._

"Good," Mercedes giggled as they linked arms and walked toward the ticket counter. "We don't have to fight over the same guy, then."

"Right," Kurt said, but kept glancing back at the pale face as it watched him walk away.

When he forced himself to stop looking, he remembered tears made of holy water on his mother's cheeks.


End file.
